Wilson, Martha, 1947-

Martha Wilson is an artist and the Founding Director of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., a multifaceted arts organization active from 1976 to the present. Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Wilson attended The George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania and graduated from Ohio's Wilmington College in 1969. She attended graduate school at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia where she received her M.A. in English Literature in 1971. She completed one year of doctoral studies at Dalhousie (leaving after a dispute with her dissertation advisor) and taught English at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NASCAD) from 1972-1974. Wilson began her work as a performance and conceptual artist in Nova Scotia and found early recognition when her piece Breast Forms Permutated (1974) was included in Lucy Lippard's show of conceptual art by women, c. 7500, at the California Institute of the Arts.

Wilson moved to New York City in 1974 and performed at venues such as The Kitchen, The Whitney, Hallwalls (Buffalo), and P.S. 1. In 1976 Wilson founded Franklin Furnace in her loft on Franklin Street in TriBeCA as a space for the display of artists' books. In 1978 Wilson joined DisBAND, an all-female conceptual band with artists Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Ingrid Sischy, and Diane Torr (at various times also including Barbara Ess, Daile Kaplan, and Barbara Kruger.) During this time Franklin Furnace was developing not only as a place for artists' books, but for temporary installation art and performance art, eventually presenting artists such as Ida Applebroog, Eric Bogosian, David Cale, Patty Chang, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Ann Hamilton, Murray Hill, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Liza Lou, Robbie McCauley, William Pope.L, Paul Zaloom, and three of the so-named NEA 4: Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and John Fleck. The Furnace's performance space was closed in 1990 after a citation for being an illegal social club leading to its first season in exile at Judson Memorial Church. In 1993 Franklin Furnace's collection of artists' books from 1960 on, at the time the largest such collection in the world, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. In 1997 The Furnace sold its loft space in TriBeCa and became a virtual institution existing primarily on the Internet.

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